Look for applications that leverage Amazon’s ease of use: EC2 instances can easily be brought up and quiesced; it’s not necessary to keep an instance up and running 24/7. Unlike a data center, where once a server is installed it’s easier to keep it running than to power it up and down, Amazon is ideally suited for applications that are used in a transient fashion, or even a temporary fashion. For example, one company I worked with had an application where it needed to test a system with 100 simultaneous browser instances. The company fired up 100 Amazon EC2 instances, ran a browser script on each one overnight, and completed the test the following day, whereupon it shut down the instances and discarded the systems. It accomplished all of this over a period of three days. Imagine how long it would take to do this in a traditional IT environment. Even better: the total cost for the simulation: $100.

Throw-away boxes
It was funny when I was talking to some developers about testing. One of the developer jumped and said “If you mess up the configuration, simply dump the instance and start a new one. Time is precious, dude!” I knew developers from server-less start-up companies in our ecosystem, who start their dev boxes every morning and run it for 12 hours (the average developer uptime) per day and shut down every night before they go home. But I never thought that one can actually use Amazon EC2 to create thousands of Test environments in the Cloud – all fresh and new – and dump them, if they mess up and/or recreate it in the next test/sprint cycle. When you are testing your mobile application on different device platforms or testing your database-agnostic and app server-agnostic middleware app on different deployment configurations, the Cloud becomes an ideal platform to create-dump-recreate environments as you need.

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Mechanical Turkfor Innovative Testing
Using the on-demand workforce to help you in testing your app: